


Number Four

by CarpeDiemForLife



Series: The Loneliest Number [4]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2020-08-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:08:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26089195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CarpeDiemForLife/pseuds/CarpeDiemForLife
Summary: All of the Hargreeves children know what it is to be lonely. It claims them each in different ways and at different times, but loneliness is the family's constant companion.--Series of ficlets examining the loneliness of each character. Fourth: Klaus.
Series: The Loneliest Number [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1885654
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	Number Four

Klaus was the loneliest Hargreeves until the day he wasn’t.

Luther and Allison had each other. Diego had Mom. Five & Ben & Vanya were thick as thieves.

(Odd, Klaus always thought. That the three most dissimilar Hargreeves would be bound together that way. Five—the one who loved their powers and missions more than any other, choosing not even to take a real name when one was offered to him. Ben—the one who hated their powers and missions the most. And Vanya—the one who had neither of those things.)

Klaus? Klaus had the ghosts. The only fate lonelier than being alone. His childhood was comprised of silence and screams and never being touched, and soon Klaus would have faded out of existence, loneliness the onrushing tide that pulled him into the netherworld.

Until the day Five disappeared. Ran away. Vanished like the last dregs of childhood innocence that he stole from his siblings as he left.

Things changed after that. Apparently Five & Ben & Vanya didn’t work without Five. Ben pulled away from his sister, turning instead to his isolated, lonesome brother. Klaus learned what it meant to have a friend. To not be so very, utterly alone. They became inseparable and it never occurred to Klaus to care that his gain was Vanya’s loss. He was a selfish creature by nature. He rarely thought of others, and he especially never thought of Vanya. That was, after all, their father’s design.

For three years he ceased to be the loneliest Hargreeves.

Then Ben died, and Klaus was again left with no one but the ghosts.

Soon Klaus lost all sense of what it meant to be alive. With a drug habit that quickly grew beyond his means, Klaus’s fingers turned light, nicking valuables from his house and his siblings, cutting his every last tie to a living person. He began to forget that he was even one of them, sinking instead into the surety that he, too, was a ghost. Invisible. Unimportant.

Nothing.

He found himself in the streets.

For all he knew, he might have been dead.

Except when he dressed in bright colors and outrageous fashions, and eyes were drawn to him as he walked by. Except when he moved wildly on the dance floor and a stranger’s fingers dug into his hips. Except when he ran his mouth and yelled out into the world and no one could ignore the incessant, loud man beside them. Except when his back rubbed up against scratchy sheets and teeth bit at his skin and his name was whispered into his ear over and over and over, along with a hundred other dirty words.

They might forget him by morning. But in that moment, he was seen.

In that moment, he was alive.

All his years on Earth, Klaus had seen what happened to people after they died. Knew that fate better than anyone. He dreaded that loneliness, the kind of his childhood, and which would last an eternity; even more than he despaired of the loneliness he felt each and every day. At least _that_ loneliness was easily buried beneath a temporary high.

He pumped more and more drugs into his system, determining that, if he couldn’t see the ghosts, he couldn’t be one of them.

Ben constantly upbraided him for this childish logic. Ben: the one ghost who wouldn’t leave. The one ghost whose lack of life seemed to reinforce Klaus’s alive-ness, rather than call it into question. Still, for all that Ben was a faithful companion, having one’s only confidant be a ghost made for a rather lonely existence.

Klaus forgot in all his self-pity that, ghost or not, a brother was a brother, and he still was not the loneliest Hargreeves any longer. 

Maybe if he had remembered that, the world wouldn’t be ending now. Maybe he could have facilitated a reconciliation between Ben and Vanya years ago. He read her book. He knows that the loss of Ben hit Vanya too hard for her to bear resentment for his dismissal of her in his last few years of life. Klaus knows that, whatever Ben might think, Vanya would forgive and accept him wholeheartedly if Klaus acted as mediator.

But he didn’t. And he knows why he didn’t. Because Ben was the only one that he had left and he knew, he _knew_ , that Ben had never _truly_ loved him the way he loved Five and Vanya. At first Klaus was a stand-in. Then he was a habit. Time had brought them closer, but Klaus knew that if Ben and Vanya were to reconnect, Klaus would lose him, becoming nothing more than the conduit for Ben and Vanya’s relationship to bloom and flourish. He’d be alone again.

Or maybe he was wrong. Maybe Ben would still want him. Maybe they could have become Ben & Vanya & Klaus.

Maybe if Klaus were a better fucking person, he would have found someone to love long before getting stuck in Vietnam in 1968.

But he hadn’t. And while his relationships with his siblings were on the mend—especially Diego, and who would’ve thought it would be him and Diego after all this time—it was still Dave he thought of as he watched chunks of the moon hurtle towards Earth. It was Dave’s dog tags in his hand. It was the thought of seeing Dave again that finally made him think, maybe... maybe this death thing wouldn’t be so bad.

**Author's Note:**

> It's one of life's real injustices that I can't give each and every one of these characters a hug.
> 
> I'd love to hear from y'all in the comments <3 Thanks for reading!


End file.
